The Problems of Work 1956 Chapter 8

Chapter Eight: The Man Who Succeeds

The conditions of success are few and easily stated.

Jobs are not held consistently and in actuality by flukes of fate or fortune. Those who depend upon luck generally experience bad luck. The ability to hold a job depends in the main upon ability. One must be able to control his work and must be able to be controlled in doing his work. One must be able, as well, to leave certain areas uncontrolled. One’s intelligence is directly related to his ability. There is no such thing as being too smart. But there is such a thing as being too stupid.

But one may be both able and intelligent without succeeding. A vital part of success is the ability to handle and control, not only one’s tools of the trade, but the people with whom one is surrounded. In order to do this one must be capable of a very high level of affinity, he must be able to tolerate massive realities and he must also be able to give and receive communication.

The ingredients of success are then: First an ability to confront work with joy and not honor; a wish to do work for its own sake, not because one “has to have a pay-check”. One must be able to work without driving oneself or experiencing deep depths of exhausted. If one experiences these things there is something wrong with him. There is some element in his environment that he should be controlling that he isn’t controlling, or his accumulated injuries are such as to make him shy away from all people and masses with whom he should be in intimate contact.

The ingredients of successful work are: training and experience in the subject being addressed, good general intelligence and ability, a capability of high affinity, a tolerance of reality, and the ability to communicate and receive ideas. Given these things there is left only a slim chance of failure. Given these things a man can ignore all of the accidents of birth, marriage or fortune, for birth, marriage and fortune are not capable of placing these necessary ingredients in one’s hands. One could have all the money in the world and yet be unable to perform an hour’s honest labor. Such a man would be a miserably unhappy one.

The person who studiously avoids work usually works far longer and far harder than the man who pleasantly confronts it and does it. Men who cannot work are not happy men.

Work is the stable datum of this society. Without something to do there is nothing for which to live. A man who cannot work is as good as dead and usually prefers death and works to achieve it.

The mysteries of life are not today, with Scientology, very mysterious. Mystery is not a needful ingredient. Only the very aberrated man desires to have vast secrets held away from him Scientology has slashed through many of the complexities which have been erected for men and has bared the core of these problems. Scientology for the first time in Man’s history can predictably raise intelligence, increase ability, bring about a return of the ability to play a game, and permits Man to escape from the dwindling spiral of his own disabilities. Therefore work itself can become a game, a pleasant and happy thing.

There is one thing which has been learned in Scientology which is very important to the state of mind of the workman. One very often feels in his society that he is working for the immediate pay-check and that he does not gain for the whole society anything of any importance. He does not know several things. One of these is how few good workmen are. On the level of executives, it is interesting to note how precious any large company finds a man who can handle and control jobs and men really is. Such people are rare. All the empty space in the structure of this work-a-day world is at the top.

And there is another thing which is quite important, and that is the fact that the world today has been led to believe, by mental philosophies calculated to betray them, that when one is dead it is all over and done with and that one has no further responsibility for anything. It is highly doubtful if this is true. One inherits tomorrow what he died out of yesterday.

Another thing we know is that men are not dispensable. It is a mechanism of old philosophies to tell men that if they think they are indispensable they should go down to the graveyard and take a look -- those men were indispensable too. This is the surest foolishness. If you really looked carefully in the graveyard you would find the machinist who set the models going in yesteryear and without whom there would be no industry today. It is doubtful if such a feat is being performed just now. A workman is not just a workman. A laborer is not just a laborer. An office worker is not just an office worker. They are living, breathing, important pillars on which the entire structure of our civilization is erected. They are not cogs in a mighty machine. They are the machine itself.

We have come to a low level of the ability to work. Offices depend very often on no more than one or two men, and the additional staffs seem to add only complexity to the activities of the scene. Countries move forward on the production of just a few factories. It is as though the world were being held together by a handful of desperate men who by working themselves to death may keep the rest of the world going, but again they may not. It is to them that this book is dedicated.